Hey, thanks for playing, and for the detailed feedback! I consider the game to be in an early prototype phase, but I also try to make things as bug free as possible and do alot of playtesting myself.
Really glad you enjoyed the melee combat, thats where most of my recent focus has been. Trying to get the combat in general to feel better. I'm still exploring options and trying to get magic to feel better to use and be more balanced. One thing I'm going to try soon is adding a 2-hit mechanic to losing your spell. So, the first time you are hit your spell bauble in the top left cracks, and if you are hit while its cracked, then you lose the spell. You can fix the cracks by not getting hit for a while, or simply by casting a reinforce spell (probably full circle, JKLI, or east-south-west-north face buttons in that or reverse order will work, it will just instantly reinforce your spell bauble, you wont have to manually cast this spell, and of course it wont overwrite whatever spell you have prepared. You can maybe also cast this when your bauble is not cracked to make add some armor to it, so you can take 3 hits before it breaks).
In the future I'd also like to have a much wider variety of enemies in an area. Not everything will be weak exclusively weak to one element, but some enemies will require more interaction with the elemental system (i.e. an enemy with a wooden shield that blocks and parries your melee, but you can get rid of the shield with fire.)
As for that float down thing on through-platforms, are you talking about it feeling like there is a cushion effect when you land from the air? If so, thats a bug in my psuedo physics script that I'm still trying to figure out... sort of a consequence of a previous bug fix I did. Will definitely work that out at some point, and/or implement code that allows you to just hold down + jump to continuously fall through platforms.
as for major unlocks and such not saving automatically, atm yea, that is intentional. I haven't yet put in the time to figure out what a good balance for difficulty and quality of life would be for a checkpoint system. Like... should I make a checkpoint/soft save when you get one of these that you can choose to respawn at instead of your last save if you die? Do I make that the default behaviour and treat it as an auto save slot that can be loaded from the title screen?? Theres a few ways to do it, and I dont know what will fit best yet.
I'm not entirely happy with the heal visuals atm, and I still need to make a player animation for it, so I haven't any bugs with it yet, but I'm aware of a couple now
In any case, thanks again for playing and providing feedback! I try to update often, and write devblogs whenever its something significant!